Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays Read online

  FROM ROBERT JAMES WALLERA

  BOOK THAT GIVES VOICE TO OUR SENSIBILITIES,

  OUR EXPERIENCES, AND OUR DREAMS…

  OLD SONGS IN A NEW CAFÉ

  “POWERFUL IN THEIR SIMPLICITY AND POIGNANCY… these essays read as if Waller was in your living room, chatting away about his hopes and dreams. It’s often difficult to sup press the desire to interrupt and say, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve felt that way. You sure put it nicely.’”

  —Blade-Citizen (CA)

  “WALLER’S STRENGTHS ARE EVIDENT right from the first one: the beautifully wrenching ‘Excavating Rachael’s Room.’ If you’ve ever had a child, read it as soon as you can get your hands on it.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “VINTAGE WALLER… a writer I’m glad to have found.… Perhaps the charm in OLD SONGS IN A NEW CAFÉ lies in Waller’s way of giving us back the world and our intimate relationships, refreshed and glistening.… While he may live in Iowa, he travels the world of the heart and soul, and through Old Songs, saves us a window seat along the way.”

  —Palm Beach Post

  “WALLER’S STRENGTH IS THAT HIS WRITING RINGS TRUE.”

  —Orange County Register (CA)

  “THERE IS GOOD WRITING IN OLD SONGS IN A NEW-CAFÉ. … You might want to dip into his nonfiction and meet the man behind Francesca Johnson, Robert Kincaid, Jellie Braden, and Michael Tillman.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “WALLER WRITES LYRICALLY”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  Copyright

  Excerpt from “Memphis, Tennessee” by Chuck Berry used with permission from Chuck Berry and Isalee Music Publishing.

  Excerpt from the poem on page 51 from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  The essays and stories have previously appeared in JUST BEYOND THE FIRELIGHT, copyright © 1988 by Iowa State University Press; ONE GOOD ROAD IS ENOUGH, copyright © 1990 by Iowa State University Press; The Des Moines Register, Country America, Humane Society of the United States News, League Lines and Voice of Humanity. Published byarrangement with the author and Iowa State University Press, Ames.

  Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1994 by Robert James Waller.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2480-4

  FOR:

  Georgia Ann, Rachael, Ruth, Robert, Sr.

  Gerald, Charlie, Sammy, Roadcat

  Perry, Harriet, Stan, Allen

  And… Orange Band.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Jim Flansburg, Jim Gannon, and Bill Silag, for their help and friendship, and for their support when others wavered. Thanks also to the lowans who read what I wrote early on and encouraged me to write more. And, finally, thanks to the rivers (they know who they are) for being the source of it all.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Preface

  Excavating Rachael’s Room

  Slow Waltz for Georgia Ann

  Incident at Sweet’s Marsh

  A Canticle for Roadcat

  Romance

  A Rite of Passage in Three Cushions

  The Boy from the Burma Hump

  Ridin’ Along in Safety with Kennedy and Kuralt

  Jump Shots

  The Turning of Fifty

  I Am Orange Band

  Drinking Wine the New York Way

  In Cedar Key, Harriet Smith Loves Birds and Hates Plastic

  Brokerage

  Running into Perry

  The Lion of Winter

  One Good Road Is Enough

  Southern Flight

  A Matter of Honor

  Foreword

  Essays by Robert James Waller began to appear in The Des Moines Register in 1983, but I did not encounter Waller’s writing until 1986. That’s when I read “Slow Waltz for Georgia Ann,” a striking tribute to a romance still strong after thirty years, expressed with exceptional grace, dignity, and unabashed sincerity. It was rare to see such a thing in a newspaper—not only the subject matter but also the lyrical quality of the writing itself.

  At the time, I was working as managing editor at Iowa State University Press, and in a letter I asked Waller about his writing plans and suggested that he and I discuss the possibility of publishing an autobiographical work that incorporated the pieces running in the Register. His response was cordial—and somewhat amused. An autobiography was probably a bit premature, he indicated, but the idea of an essay collection appealed to him. In fact, he was already at work on several additional Register pieces.

  The following summer the Register published, in eight installments, Waller’s magnificent account of an unaccompanied 100-mile journey he made by canoe on Iowa’s Shell Rock River. The essay was at once a celebration of Iowa’s natural beauty and an indictment of public indifference about its preservation. Waller’s river voyage became the talk of Iowa and fueled debates in taverns and cafes across the state. Not everyone in Iowa was delighted by what Waller had written, but a flood of mail to the Register indicated Waller’s message had been heard.

  The mail also revealed the unusual appeal of the writer’s style. It wasn’t simply that Waller expressed people’s concerns about the natural environment; it was the captivating way he said it. “You painted with words what I experienced, but found difficult to relate,” wrote one reader.

  Subsequent essays in the Register also drew praise, and increasingly readers’ comments focused on Waller himself, rather than on his own subjects: “Some people are given the gift to be able to reach another person’s heart,” declared one letter, written in praise of “A Canticle for Roadcat.” “You are loved and appreciated by a great number of people you probably will never meet, but who feel they know you because of a kindred spirit.”

  For some of us at least, discovering a writer like this can be a startling and even troubling experience—here is someone giving candid expression to the vague longings stirring within us that we thought were only our own. Waller dares to describe these feelings, and does so with great skill. He draws us into his world with the elegance of his language and holds us there by the authority with which he addresses matters of concern to us all.

  These are often matters of the heart, as in The Bridges of Madison County and in several of the essays collected here, often involving characters and situations having counterparts in our own lives. Especially in the earlier essays, Waller focuses on the events of a conventional midwestern life—a man and his family, his memories of childhood, and his concerns about the future. Yet even when he writes of experiences we know firsthand, Waller illuminates them so brilliantly that we are forced to look at things—memories and desires, families and relationships, landscapes—in new ways.

  This isn’t Waller’s main purpose in writing. For him, the creative process is a personal exercise in self-discovery. “I am discovering, as I write, what I really think, what I really believe,” he explains in his essay “Getting the Words Rightly Set.” This is the magic—and the power-—of creative writing as a means of self-expression. “Your deepest feelings can cause you to shudder a bit… because you didn’t know they were there and writing has uncovered them.”

  But no matter what his topic, Waller has the ability to make it his own, such is the confidenc
e with which he writes. This too is an expression of self. “I’m not refined and tentative as a person. I have strong emotions, I am passionate about things, I am a little rough around the edges, I can easily become overly sentimental, and all of this comes through in my writing,” he said in a letter to me when we were just getting to know each other. And, he suggested, for him the outcome was perhaps less important than the process itself: “I take chances….Some times things work out, sometimes they don’t.”

  Things have worked out very well in the years since then. Eventually Waller published two books of essays with Iowa State University Press: Just Beyond the Firelight (1988) and One Good Road Is Enough (1990). Word of the two books spread gradually beyond Iowa, due in part to the reprinting of individual essays in national magazines but also as a result of Waller’s own travels. Mail arriving at our offices and at Waller’s home indicated that pockets of Waller fans had formed in Washington, New Mexico, and elsewhere around the country. Now of course what were once scattered fans are part of a network of Waller readers who have kept The Bridges of Madison County at the top of the best-seller lists for nearly a year.

  Robert Waller’s enormous popular success is a testament to his ability to draw readers into his quest for self-discovery. Recently Oprah Winfrey described The Bridges of Madison County as a book “that’s touching souls all across the country.” She told her television audience that when she finished the book, she wanted to talk to others who had read it and to share Waller’s gift. Readers of the essays collected here are likely to react the same way, as they discover the distinctive gifts of a remarkable writer.

  BILL SILAG

  Iowa State University Press

  January 1994

  Preface

  I began writing these little pieces on a warm, green morning in the summer of 1983. “Ridin’ Along in Safety with Kennedy and Kuralt” was the first. Until then I had written only academic journal articles plus a fair number of songs I played and sang during my twenty-four years as a bar musician. Just why I decided to take up the writer’s trade is not clear to me now, nor was it any clearer then, I suspect. In fact, until recently I’d never considered writing as a way to make a living. So, as best I remember, it merely seemed like an interesting thing to do at the time. I began writing for that reason and none other, which is pretty much the way I’ve lived my entire life.

  I puttered along, writing mostly on weekends, publishing a few pieces each year in The Des Moines Register. People wrote or called to say they enjoyed the essays. Jim Gannon and Jim Flansburg of the Register encouraged me to keep writing. Since I was a university dean at the time, applause from anybody, anywhere, was welcome.

  After reading “Slow Waltz for Georgia Ann,” Bill Silag, who was then editor at the Iowa State University Press, suggested a collection of the Register pieces. That also seemed like a good thing to do, and it delighted me to think the essays would be gathered into a single volume, which we titled Just Beyond the Firelight. Taken together, they formed something of an autobiographical sketch covering my first forty years, and that sounded a whole lot easier than someday possibly writing a history of my meandering life for possible grandchildren who possibly might not care in any case.

  A second collection, One Good Road Is Enough, was subsequently published, and suddenly I had two books in print when I never expected to have any. I began work on a third, which eventually appeared as Iowa: Perspectives on Today and Tomorrow, a fairly long and analytical work on the curious place of my growing and living.

  Then came The Bridges of Madison County. To date, it has sold more than 4.5 million copies, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 76 weeks, and has occupied the top position for 36 weeks. Bridges changed my life in ways I still do not completely understand. In any case, Pm pleased that Warner Books decided to reissue the early essays. I think you’ll find they have much the same flavor as Bridges.

  If I were to write these pieces now, I would not handle them as I originally did, but I am unapologetic about the way they look and taste. They represent where I was at the time they were written, nothing more. We come, we do, we go, and I think we should not take ourselves more seriously than that.

  You’ll meet my wife, my daughter, and my old friend and colleague, Roadcat, who was as good and true a friend as anyone could wish for. And I’ll take you back with me to the flatlands dust and heat of Rockford, Iowa, in the 1940s and 1950s. There, in a quiet, unobtrusive place between two rivers, I found heroes of a size that suited me. For example, Sammy Patterson, billiards master; Kenny Govro, cat fisherman; and Perry Burgess, who worked as a kiln stacker at the local brick-and-tile plant.

  We’ll ride along through Asian nights with Captain Charlie Uban, an Iowa boy who took C-47 cargo planes into territory where they were never meant to go, into the snow and wind of the southern Himalayas when the world had lost control. We’ll fly yet another time, with a flock of Canada geese beating their way south through a midwestern blizzard, and well think about what it means to fly no more when we look through cage wire at a fellow named Orange Band, who was the last member of his species, resting there on his perch and perhaps contemplating what zero truly means.

  There’s more—things run amuck when river otters are turned loose in Iowa, and we’ll look at the art and technique of the long-range jump shot. I coast by my fiftieth birthday and wonder about it, my father confronts an assault on his honesty, and I run into an extraordinary woman in the back country of Florida.

  In short, this is a book about people and animals and things I care about. It’s about growing up and showing your stuff, finding love, winning and losing, and getting older. It’s about where I began and where I came to at a particular time in my life, as a person and as a writer. And I suppose it’s also about where Pm headed, though I never seem to realize such things at the time. We come, we do, we go, and the doing can be a rather grand voyage if you don’t panic and if you believe, as I believe, in magic and imagination and wizards who live along quiet country rivers.

  ROBERT JAMES WALLER

  Cedar Falls, Iowa

  January 1994

  Excavating

  Rachael’s Room

  ______________________________________

  Like some rumpled alien army awaiting marching orders, the brown trash bags hunker down on the patio in a column of twos. A hard little caravan are they, resting in sunlight and shadow and caring not for their cargos, the sweepings of childhood and beyond.

  With her eighteenth birthday near, Rachael has moved to Boston, leaving her room and the cleaning of it to us.

  After conducting a one-family attempt at turning United Parcel Service into something resembling North American Van Lines, we gather by the front door early on a Sunday morning.

  Beside the suitcases are stacked six boxes, taped and tied. In my innocence, I tap the topmost box and ask, “What are these?”

  “That’s the stuff I couldn’t get in my suitcases last night; you guys can send it to me,” she replies, rummaging through her purse. Out of habit, I begin a droning lecture on planning ahead, realize the futility of it, and am quiet.

  She has a deep caring for the animals and purposely, we know, avoids saying good-bye to them, particularly the small female cat acquired during her stay at camp one summer, years ago.

  The cat has shared her bed, has been her confidant and has greeted her in the afternoons when she returned from school. Good-bye would be too much, would bring overpowering tears, would destroy the blithe air of getting on with it she is trying hard to preserve.

  We watch her walk across the apron of the Waterloo airport, clutching her ticket, and she disappears into the funny little Air Wisconsin plane.

  Turning, just as she left the departure lounge, she grinned and flashed the peace sign. I was all right until then, but with that last insouciant gesture, so typical of her, the poignancy of the moment is driven home and tears come.

  We hurry outside and stand in hot sunlight to see the
plane leave. I note that we have never done this before, for anyone.

  Clinging to the heavy fence wire along the airport boundary, I watch the plane take off to the west and make a last allegoric circle over Cedar Falls. East she travels and is gone, disappearing in the haze of an Iowa summer.

  Back home, beer in hand, we sit on the porch, listening to the hickory nuts fall, recounting the failures and remembering the triumphs.

  For the 500th time in the last eighteen years, we describe to each other the night of her birth, how she looked coming down the hall in the Bloomington, Indiana, hospital on the gurney in her mother’s arms. How we felt, how we feel, what we did and didn’t do.

  We take a few days off, just to get used to the idea of there being only two of us again. Then, tentatively, we push open the door to her room.

  The dogs peer into the darkness from around our legs and look up at us. The room—well—undulates. It stands as a shrine to questionable taste, a paean to the worst of American consumerism. The last few echoes of Def Leppard and Twisted Sister are barely audible. Georgia sighs.

  I suggest flame throwers coupled with a front-end loader and caution the cleanup crew, which now includes the two cats, about a presence over in one of the corners. Faintly, I can hear it rustle and snarl. It is, I propose, some furry guardian of teenage values, and it senses, correctly, that we are enemies.

  Trash bags in hand, we start at the door and work inward, tough-minded.

  “My god, look at this stuff; let’s toss it all.”

  The first few hours are easy. Half-empty shampoo bottles go into the bags, along with three dozen hair curlers, four dozen dried-up ball-point pens and uncountable pictures of bare-chested young men with contorted faces clawing at strange-looking guitars.

  Farther into the room salvage appears: the hammer that disappeared years ago; about six bucks in change; 50 percent of the family’s towel and drinking-glass stock; five sets of keys to the Toyota. More. Good stuff. We work with a vengeance.